week 8:3
On Eros, Ender is never happy. The tunnels of the city that went through the asteroid were low, narrow, and seemed...odd. It was very uncomfortable physically, as well as emotoinally. Ender is once again seperated from everybody, this time because all of the other students are much older than him and don't pay him any mind. He spends alot of time with Graff, when he s not in his classes. He soaks all of his new classes in, but soon realizes that, like Battle School, there is a game here also, a game that is what Command school is all about. Just like battle school.
The game is a computer simulator of starship battles. He starts with only one ship, but then progresses to commanding 4 ships. he soon learns that he is more likely to win the battles if he never controls one of the ships individually, but commands the whole battle. After a year or so, he starts winning every game tht the computer can possibly throw at him, and this is commanding entire fleets in the simulator. Ender begins to wish for his old friends from Battle school, or rather, he begins to wish he could trust the commanders of his ships to do the jobs he gave them, so he could concentrate more on the battle as the whole.
He asks Graff when the game is going to get hard again, and the next day Graff is gone, and he has been locked in his room with a silent old man. They don't say anything to each other after a while, but then in less than a second, the man has Ender haging upside down. He tells Ender that he should never expect his enemy to be passive. Ender asks if he is his enemy, and the man tells him that he is. He says that he is his new teacher, and that the only true teacher is the enemy. The enemy is the only one you can ever learn anything from. After another short fight, the man leaves, and tells Ender that he is Mazer Rackham, the pilot who defeated the buggers in the secon invasion, 80 years ago.
I like the line where it says that the only one you can ever learn anything form is the enemy. It is true, but not in such a literal sense as the book puts it in. It is true, though, you will always learn much more from opposition and experience than from a friend who never challenges your abilities.
Graff takes Ender to a launch station, where they take a shuttle to the long-distance launching satellite that orbits earth. On the way up, Graff tries to comfort Ender, who is positive that graff doesn't care abou thim, and that the gesture was was Graff had been trained to do.
From there they commandeer a shuttle to the IF command center (where the school is), which is on a large asteroid called Eros, on the far reaches of the galaxy. Ender realizes Graff's true indifference to the world when he tells the captain of the ship that since he has seen the secret center of the fleet command, he can't leave untill after the war.
On the month-long journey to Eros, Ender asks Graff all that he can about the buggers. Graff tells him that they really don't know much, but that basically the whole reason that their war with the buggers started was becasue they were not able to communicate. He told Ender about how the Buggers can communicate with each other instantaneously and how humans have been able to copy their form of mental communication with machines. he says that since the buggers can do this with their brains, they have no need for a language, which is why early diplomatic envoys were seend as threats by them, and vis versa. he said that the war may be stupid, but all that matters is that the buggers are now trying to kill them and there's nothing to do but try and survive.
I saw this part as a subliminal protest to war, and how most of them are started due to a failure to communicate. It reminded me of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5.
Throughout this whole section of the book, i view Ender's willingness to learn as a sign of his impatience to get the deed done so he can go home. he's still a little kid, and that becomes more and more obvious as the story goes on.
In this next part, it tells of how Ender has been taken down to Earth for a short leave before he goes to command school. While Graff has intended the stay on Earth to be only a few weeks at most, Ender has been there for about thrre months, refusing to leave. So what does Graff do? Once again, he calls Valentine for help.
She goes to the little lake where Ender has been staying, where he's built himself a raft so he can go out onto the lake all alone, away from the officers. she goes out onto the lake with him, and even though she is twelve and he is only ten, the hardness of his mannerisms scare her. She tries not to show it, but he notices, and doesn't seem to mind. After a long talk, she thinks she realizwes why he doesn't want to fight the buggers anymore. She thinks that it is because Peter is the only true enemy he's ever had, and he's never been able to beat him. She tells Ender that by beating the buggers, he will deny Peter the power that he so craves, and thereby beat Peter. Ender surprises her by saying that he never wanted to beat Peter, he just wanted to be loved by him. It is then that Valentine realizes that even though the 4 years he's been at battle school have changed alot about him, he's never really changed at heart. She tells him that she will love him no matter what he does, win or lose, even if Peter never does.
Valentine leaves, and Ender decides to go to Command School.
week 7:3
In the intro to the chapter, the commander of the IF is asking Graff if he knows about how there is a plot to beat the living hell out of Ender, if not kill him. Graff says that he does, and yet he will do nothing about it, and reaffirms his philosophy that if they help Ender, he’ll never reach his full potential.
It’s been 4 weeks since we last saw Ender, and his army has had a battle every day. They haven’t lost, even though the games are increasingly more stacked against them. After beating an army that won’t stay frozen, Ender goes to the showers during lunch. While he’s in the shower, Bonzo Madrid, Bernard, and others come in to “persuade” Ender to start loosing some games. Ender taunts Bonzo, saying that his father would be proud of him, bringing six friends to beat up a naked little kid in the showers. Bonzo is enraged, but he evens the odds, he forbids his friends to join in, and takes off his own clothes. Dink Meeker comes in to try and save Ender, but they stop him. Ender uses the advantage of his soapy skin to escape Bonzo’s grasp, and then proceeds to beat the ---- out of Bonzo. Bonzo is laying face down in a pool of his own blood when Dink takes him from the bathroom. Dink keeps reassuring him, but Ender feels terrible, he cries and says that he never wanted to hurt him.
Ender goes back to his room and sleeps for about ten minutes, when he finds another battle notice, a battle against two armies. They go out, and realize that the Teachers have situated the lights and stars in the battle room so Ender couldn’t see any of the opposing armies. Ender has Bean take his group to go find out what’s happening on the enemy’s side, and using an invisible deadline Bean found, they do. The other armies are just waiting for Ender to do something, so Ender shocks them all and makes a formation, a shield around other soldiers that they drove into the mass of the enemy just when things were looking the worst for Ender, the lights come on and Dragon army is proclaimed winner. Everyone wonders what happened, while Ender was creating the huge distraction with the rest of his army, Bean took his group and opened the enemy’s gate, winning the game. Ender yells at Major Anderson, asking him when they’d start giving him even odds. Anderson ignores him, but one of the enemy commanders says that as long as Ender is on one army, they teams would never be fair. All the soldiers, enemy and Dragon army alike, start cheering for Ender.
Ender goes back to his room, to find from Bean that they have disintegrated his army, making all his toon leaders and assistants commanders of armies whose commanders they had graduated. Ender finds that he’s been graduated, to command school. Before Graff takes him to command school, though they have to return to earth first.
After the battle that night, Ender calls Bean into his room. It’s 10 minutes from lights out, and Bean wonders why. Ender tells him how he knows that the teachers are trying to break him and Dragon Army, but he also knows that he can take it-for a while. He tells Bean that he can’t keep coming up with new ideas indefinitely, so he wants Bean to. He reminds Bean of his request to be a toon leader weeks ago, and how he denied him. Ender tells him that he needs to choose 5 boys from a list that Ender gives him, and that those would be his toon. It is to be a “special force,” where Bean thinks of the most…unexpected tactics, and to train them apart from the regular army, to be called on only when needed.
The lights go out, and Bean stays rather than try to find his way back to bed. Ender laughs as he tells Bean that if he listens carefully, he would hear the teachers drop off their battle announcement for the next day.
I like this part, because it shows how Ender knows that he can’t go on forever, and yet he can’t loose a single game.
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